Brainfuck is one among the most popular esoteric programming languages. Writing a Brainfuck interpreter is fun, in contrary to actually using this "language". The syntax is dead simple and semantics are rather clear. Thus writing such interpreter is a good candidate for Kata session, TDD practice, etc. Using Clojure for the task is slightly more challenging due to inherent impedance mismatch between imperative Brainfuck and functional Clojure. However you will find plenty of existing implementations ([1], [2], [3], [4]), many of them are less idiomatic as they use atoms to mutate state in-place ([5], [6], [7], [8], [9]).
Let's write a simple, idiomatic brainfuck interpreter ourselves, step by step. It turns out that the transition from mutability to immutability is quite straightforward - rather than mutating state in-place we simply exchange previous state with the new one. In Brainfuck state is represented by cells (memory), cell (pointer to one of the cells, an index…
Let's write a simple, idiomatic brainfuck interpreter ourselves, step by step. It turns out that the transition from mutability to immutability is quite straightforward - rather than mutating state in-place we simply exchange previous state with the new one. In Brainfuck state is represented by cells (memory), cell (pointer to one of the cells, an index…